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Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88

Interviewed by Will Aitken

Issue 171, Fall 2004

Anne Carson and I first met in 1988 at a writers’ workshop in Canada, and have been reading each other’s work ever since. The interview that follows is a mix of our usual conversation and discussion about topics that preoccupy Carson’s work—mysticism, antiquity, obsession, desire.

Carson was born on June 21, 1950, in Toronto, the second and final child of Margaret and Robert Carson. Her mother was a housewife; her father worked for the Toronto Dominion Bank. During her childhood, the family moved about from bank to bank in small Ontario towns like Stoney Creek, Port Hope, Timmins.

In the 1970s Carson studied classics at the University of Toronto and then ancient Greek with the renowned classical scholar Kenneth Dover at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1981, she returned to the University of Toronto to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Sappho, which later became Eros the Bittersweet— a brief, dense treatise on lack’s centrality to desire. Today, Carson lives in Ann Arbor, where she teaches classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan.

Although she has always been reluctant to call herself a poet, Carson has been writing some heretic form of poetry almost all her life. Her work is insistent and groundbreaking, a blend of genres and styles that for years failed to attract notice. In the late eighties, a few literary magazines in the United States began to publish her work. Canadian venues were considerably less welcoming, and it was not until Carson was forty-two that a small Canadian pub- lisher, Brick Books, published her first book of poems, Short Talks.

By the mid-nineties, Carson was no longer trying to find publishers; rather, publishers were clamoring to find her. In short order, three collections of poems and essays appeared—Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995); Glass, Irony and God (1995); Men in the Off Hours (2000)—as well as a verse novel, Autobiography of Red (1998), which seamlessly blends Greek myth, homosexuality, and small-town Ontario life. Two ostensibly academic books followed: Economy of the Unlost and her translation of Sappho’s poetry, If Not, Winter, both in 2002.

Awards and accolades came tumbling in: a Guggenheim Fellowship (1995); a Lannan Award (1996); the Pushcart Prize (1997); a MacArthur Fellowship (2000); and the Griffin Prize for Poetry (2001). In 2002 Carson became the first woman to receive England’s T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.

For the past several years, Carson has been working on a spoken-word opera about three women mystics—Aphrodite, the fourteenth-century French heretic Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil. Next year, Random House will publish Decreation—the eponymously titled opera—alongside new poems and essays.

We started the following interview just after Christmas in 2002. Exhausted by the joyous demands of the season, Carson stretched out on an orange velveteen sofa and we talked—fortified by cups of oolong tea—for several hours.

—Will Aitken

INTERVIEWER

I want to start with your poem “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions.” There’s a line in there that stopped me right in the middle: “My personal poetry is a failure.” It made me wonder two things: What do you call your personal poetry? And do you really feel it’s a failure or is that just the poem’s persona talking?

CARSON

Well, I think there are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don’t say what I want them to say. And that’s true of the persona in the poem, but it’s also true of me as me.

INTERVIEWER

When you look back on “The Glass Essay,” for example, do you consider it a personal poem? Do you see it as a failure?

CARSON

I see it as a messing around on an upper level with things that I wanted to make sense of at a deeper level. I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts—to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life. But when I wrote “The Glass Essay,” I also wanted to do something that I would call understanding what life feels like, and I don’t believe I did.

I also don’t know what it would be to do that, but if you read Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, there’s a fragrance of understanding you come away with—this smell in your head of having gone through something that you understood with the people in the story. When I think about my writing, I don’t feel that.

INTERVIEWER

Is that because it’s still part of your ongoing personal experience?

CARSON

Well, that’s possible. But how can one ever judge those things?

INTERVIEWER

Or that it might be a failure to you, but a success for everybody else who picks it up?

CARSON

I think so, because this capturing of the surface of emotional fact is useful for other people in that it jolts them into thinking, into doing their own act of understanding. But I still don’t think I finished the thinking.

INTERVIEWER

There’s another line in “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions”—“I want to be unbearable”—that strikes me as exact and expressive of you as a writer.

CARSON

I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier. I felt like a ship going toward the South Pole and then all of a sudden a glacier comes zooming out of the dark, and I just took it down. I appreciate that it’s accurate of what I both have and choose to have as my effect on people. I don’t know exactly why that’s the case.

INTERVIEWER

You once said you meant unbearable in a metaphysical sense.

CARSON

Well, yes, it couldn’t be physical, could it? Unless I went around hammering people.

INTERVIEWER

There are those days.

CARSON

With sharp objects. It’s true, that’s why I go to boxing class, to learn those skills. But that’s just, of course, shadowboxing, as they say.